* Bluegrass thrives, despite country aficionados calling it a weed
Jim Patterson
* 02/25/99
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
(Copyright 1999)
* NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Not long before he died, bluegrass founder Bill
* Monroe confided to country music star Ricky Skaggs that he was
worried his brand of music was dying, too.
* Monroe passed away in September 1996, but bluegrass hasn't.
Skaggs and a handful of other well-known and not-so-well-known
artists have seen to that.
TD * Skaggs released his Bluegrass Rules! album in 1997 and followed it
* up this year with Ancient Tomes. Nashville outlaw Steve Earle and
* onetime Monroe band member Del McCoury also have new bluegrass albums
that are superb.
* Bluegrass has been stigmatized, Skaggs said. "It's Deliverance,
it's The Beverly Hillbillies . . .
* get-drunk-at-a-bluegrass-festival-and-fall-over kind of music. And
it's not. There's so much more depth to it than that."
Monroe should have known his music would survive. During his
* lifetime, bluegrass weathered the rise of rock 'n' roll and the cold
* shoulder of the country music industry, which still treats it like an
embarrassing relative.
* "This is the original alternative country music," Earle said.
"It's fun. It's the most fun I have playing music."
* Skaggs, 44, a former bluegrass prodigy who scored a string of No.
* 1 country singles in the 1980s, said bluegrass deserves a larger role
in the current country market.
"Garth Brooks' music . . . may be the legs and the hands and the
* head right now of country music, but I'm telling you, the heart and
* soul of this music beats in tradition. It beats in bluegrass," said
* Skaggs, whose new album includes updates of bluegrass numbers by
Monroe and The Stanley Brothers.
It got its name from Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, who invented
the form in the 1930s. Fast, intricate and dominated by acoustic
* strings and tight vocal harmonies, bluegrass became marginalized in
* the 1950s when country music artists reacted to the rise of rock 'n'
roll by putting more emphasis on drums and electric guitars.
* Bluegrass, still primarily acoustic and drumless, benefited from
* the folk music revival of the 1960s and has developed separately from
* the rest of country music ever since.
It is popular enough today to support more than 500 music
festivals each summer. It's also blessedly free of having to kowtow
* to radio programmers, because country music stations won't play
* bluegrass.
"Back in the '50s, you'd hear Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs and
Ernest Tubb and Roy Acuff all on the same station," McCoury said.
* "Then, of course, bluegrass and country got segregated as years went
by."
The result is that outside of live shows and an occasional public
* radio station broadcast, it's hard to hear bluegrass music without
buying an album. That's a shame, given the deep talent pool in
* modern bluegrass.
New albums by McCoury, master dobro guitarist Rob Ickes and J.D.
Crowe and the New South illustrate the diversity and excellence of
* modern bluegrass.
Ickes interprets Herbie Hancock on his jazzy Slide City album,
while Crowe and his band play hard-country Merle Haggard and Charley
Pride hits on Come on Down to My World.
The Family, a new album by the Del McCoury Band, shows the best
* current bluegrass band and singer at the top of their game. The Del
McCoury Band also backs Earle on his album, The Mountain.
* For Earle, a gifted songwriter who has hopscotched across folk,
* rock and country over the years, making The Mountain presented a
* writing challenge and an opportunity to record the kind of country
* music he loves.
Earle, 44, said he no longer cares about what's going on with
* mainstream country music, and when he goes out in Nashville, it's to
* listen to bluegrass.
* For those looking to get a taste of bluegrass, a good starting
place is the newly released second volume of Vanguard's Generations
* of Bluegrass featuring everything from classics of The Osborne
Brothers and Monroe to contemporaries like Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas
and Skaggs.
* "It's a little hard to convince people to give bluegrass a try,"
Skaggs said.
* "Throw away everything you've ever heard about bluegrass. This is
a new day, there are new musicians. You've got people like Del
McCoury, Blue Highway, Alison Krauss - there's great musicians out
there bringing a quality music that has substance, it has heart and
soul. . . .
